SHE SAID – By Kathrine Schooner
You know what I’m tired of seeing? Women kissing men’s asses in movies. Oh, you saved the city? Kiss me! Oh, you’re a secret agent, but I can only be your Bond Girl? Kiss me! Oh, I’m so desperate that I’ll take love from a married man? Kiss me!
I mean c’mon ladies! Any respectable woman (or one that knew what was good for her) would put her foot down and not stand for any of that crap, so why is that how we are portrayed in films that billions of people will view for years to come? Well, according to Hollywood—and its sole concentration on profits—that’s apparently what people want to see. Even though women have been fighting for equality for hundreds of years, in society we are still considered the “lesser sex”…. so I guess it’s only fair that we settle for supporting actress right? Wrong!
For starters, use of women as sexual objects in movies is beginning to become widely overused and unnecessary. I understand the use for sex scenes in movies, whether you admit it or not nearly everyone enjoys a little passion in a movie to spice things up. However, approximately 26 percent of women get partially naked in films compared to the measly 9 percent of men, AND a whole 29 percent of women wear sexually revealing clothes on set opposed to the 7 percent of men, according to The New York Film Academy. If this is considered “equal”, then I suggest that the U.S. Department of Education should fire every math teacher in the nation.
Many people will shrug this off believing it’s not a big deal, saying things like “It’s just a movie, don’t get your feministic granny panties in a bunch.” Well they are bunched, bunched up just like the Brady’s.
What are these films and representations doing to the image of women? And more importantly what are they doing to the young girls being exposed to them?
Anytime you watch a movie, your subconscious assumes that a majority of that fictional material is true, even if it obviously isn’t. So, as you go along learning new information day-by-day at jobs and school etc. ALL of that information is stored in your brain and soon you cannot remember where you originally learned it. This is something that psychologists refer to as source amnesia.
Sam Wang, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton stated in the New York Times article, “Your Brain Lies to You”, that “Source amnesia can also lead people to forget whether a statement is true. Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer, people often later remember it as true.”
So, what I’m ultimately trying to get at here is that young girls are basically getting gender roles and sexist biases from Hollywood jammed down their throats and internalize that as “normal.” Younger girls grow up adoring the Disney Princesses and all for what? To learn that if they’re ever in trouble that a man will come and save them. According to american.edu, “Disney movies could be seen as a very sexist influence on children only starting to form their views of the world.”
Nevertheless, the granny panties can be loosened up a smidge. Not only Disney, but also the rest of the motion picture realm are striving to step it up. Between the years of 1989 and 1998 Disney released the Little Mermaid, Pocahontas, and Mulan, all of which exhibit stronger and more independent female roles; furthermore, not to mention the recent productions of The Hunger Games, Frozen, and Maleficent.
So ladies, assuming that this trend continues, you may shimmy out of those granny panties and pull on a pair of cheekies from Victoria’s Secret.
HE SAID – by Matt Rooney
The question “Can female actresses be as accepted on screen as their male counterparts?” is an easy one to answer: Yes, and stop asking stupid questions.
This is not simply because movies like “The Hunger Games”, “Twilight” and one-offs like “Lucy” have dominated the box-office, but because history has already answered the question for us.
Just look at some of the most classic, revered movies of all time. Some like “Gone With the Wind”, “The Wizard of Oz”, “All About Eve”, “Mary Poppins”, “The Sound of Music” and even “Titanic” not only center the plot on women and were advertised with women at the forefront, but were huge box-office smashes and dominated the Academy Awards.
Hell, even three of them—“Wind”, “Poppins” and “Titanic”—make up three of the five highest-grossing movies of all time (when adjusted for inflation). I don’t know about you, but I take that as a sign that nobody had a problem seeing a movie lead by a woman.
Not just audiences have fallen in love with women at the movies, but so have their peers. The actor to win the most Academy Awards for acting is—wait for it—a woman (Katherine Hepburn, 4 wins). Even today the actor to hold the most nominations is Meryl Streep with 18 nominations (3 wins). If she were to get money for how many awards she’s won she could buy all men and turn them into snails.
Need more proof? You can even look at shows in the 80’s, the generation of manly action movies and steroids, and find shows like “Charlie’s Angels”. Even shows like “T.J. Hooker” saw buxom blonde Heather Locklear teaming up will Bill Shatner to make horrible television. But it still counts.
And of course we can fast forward to today where this year alone saw women like Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Lawrence, and Scarlett Johansson steal the box-office from bearded men in movies like “Maleficent”, “X-Men: Days of Future Past”, and “Lucy”.
The latter won the #1 spot from same-day release, “Hercules”, also an action movie starring an established action hero, Dwayne Johnson. That’s because both men and women wanted to see a movie about a woman—a smart woman nonetheless.
Now I will admit that movies on the whole are dominated by men. Action movies, westerns, even modern superhero movies all seem to star men and some of the biggest blockbusters feature men front-and-center. But that’s because we are better at simply looking like the hero.
We look stronger, have tougher exteriors and are simply more believable as the hero—on top of the fact society expects us to be the hero. We are put on this pedestal of manliness that we have to achieve to even call ourselves men. No one knows this more than a guy who weighs 130 lbs.
But that’s not to say women can’t do it and do it better. All it takes is someone willing to write a great role and an equally great actress to bring it to life. Modern stars like Jolie, Zoe Saldana, Gina Carano, Michelle Rodriguez and more have all stepped up to the task and we’ve all eaten it up.
I’m sure all you veteran contrarians out there are still trying to disagree with me for reasons like “But…I…uh…”, and “Uh…uh…but…the economy”, or even “but there are more male celebrities then female”. That’s probably wrong, but it doesn’t matter, because guess who was the first? A woman, named Florence Lawrence. Go ahead and Wikipedia that s—. I’ll wait.
